


Gems

by cruisedirector



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, Dialogue Heavy, Episode: s02e25 Resolutions, Episode: s03e08 The Empath, Episode: s03e15 Coda, F/M, Female Character In Command, Holodeck, Holodecks/Holosuites, Love Confessions, Love Test, Maquis, Not Beta Read, Romance, Terrorism, Workplace Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:54:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 8,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruisedirector/pseuds/cruisedirector
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chakotay passes a love test.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Claire Gabriel (cgabriel)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cgabriel/gifts).



> A story I never quite finished that appeared in _Delta Quadrant of Venus_. Originally called "Sophie's Choice" and set during the first season, I realized after I read _Mosaic_ that the theme had already been done, though I think the concept was executed most hauntingly in the Classic Trek episode "The Empath," so I am using that as my jumping-off point. The Love Test was devised by another legendary science fiction show, _Space: 1999_, from the episode "Brian the Brain" (and Helena and John passed it, which is why every J/C fan should check out that show immediately). 
> 
> The story is for Claire Gabriel, who gave me commentary on the first draft and is in no way responsible for this chaotic version.

The first officer had had a perfect sojourn on the bountiful planet that helped replenish reserves and bolster morale, until he was undone by a question from one of their hosts. If his brain hadn't been so addled from the drink they'd been sharing at the farewell party, he could probably have wriggled out of answering, and the whole thing would have been forgotten. But he was already under the influence of both the alien alcohol and his captain, who had been running her tongue rather provocatively around her lips to catch the last drops of the delicious liqueur. He wouldn't even have realized that he had been staring, but she spied him watching her and raised her eyebrows in amused wariness, making him grin...she shook her head and grinned back, as the disembodied voice from behind him spoke:

"Do you love her?"

At first he thought he must have misheard, but her head snapped back, the smile vanishing. Her eyes did not leave his face, however, as the voice repeated, "Do. You. Love. Her."

Maybe the universal translator was malfunctioning, he thought.

They all waited.

Chakotay tried to respond with a question, to turn the tables - what did they mean by it, what business was it of theirs, why did it matter? But these were sensitive people, who had not taken at all well to misdirection or refusal to answer their queries during the generous exchange. He knew that the longer he stalled, the more he risked causing a diplomatic rift. The captain - yes, the captain, not a name, just a title - shook her head slightly, and he knew he had to reply in the negative. He tried to convey his apologies for the brusqueness to her with an inclination of his head, just in case the slight was something she would take personally, but of course that was ridiculous, and she seemed to nod in agreement. Her lips parted as if she would tell him something else, but she remained silent. His mouth started to form the word, pulling into a rounded grimace. But for some reason Chakotay had forgotten to breathe in the moments after the question was asked, so he could not force enough air between his lips to pronounce the shape of the sound. He took a deep breath, tried again.

The syllable would not come.

The captain's nostrils flared and her jaw set as she glared at him, willing him to say no. He broke contact with her gaze, summoning the darkest thoughts he had ever had about her, knowing she would forgive him for whatever he told himself so that he could make the utterance. Still the sound would not emerge. When it should have been so easy. When he'd told himself again and again that he didn't love her, not anymore at least, and maybe he had never loved her at all. Maybe he didn't even know what the word meant.

He wasn't sure he ever had, but Neelix had reminded Chakotay recently of something he had told the Talaxian a long time ago. "What you gain in love is always greater than what you risk." He hadn't remembered having said the words, not until Neelix recalled the day and the corridor where they'd been standing, on a ship twisted by gravometric distortions. Then he knew why he'd said it, and whom he'd really been talking about, even if he couldn't say her name at the time - not even when he knelt by her unconscious form and tried to bring her back with words.

It should have been such a relief to take possession of the word that would end the pain growing inside him. To pull out the roots that closed around his heart, stabbing and suffocating him. To tear out the seedling, already deprived of light and fertile soil. To let it die already, this small shoot of feeling already stunted, collapsed under its own crushed, glistening weight. No point in mourning something she had refused to nourish. Maybe another would take its place.

Except something bloomed for an instant on her face - something she tried very hard to push down. It wove around her alarm at his silence, past decorum and duty, pushing aside protocol and the Prime Directive as it burst into the light.

And suddenly he was free, as if his hosts had offered him a way up from the ground but he had had to clear his own way into the sun. Smiling as if there were no one else in the room with them, he spoke directly to Kathryn, almost inaudibly but very clearly:

"Yes."

And felt himself burst into blossom.

Before Chakotay could watch her react, he turned back to their hosts and said, "Forgive me, but you startled me - where I come from, trade partners don't discuss such matters." The conversation turned to cultural differences, and the moment passed. He beamed back to the ship without discussing it with her - without discussing anything, not even the duty rosters. She kept her back to him for the rest of the mission, during the beam-up, all through the walk to the bridge. When his shift ended, she had hidden away in her ready room.

Remarkably, he felt no guilt. No embarrassment, no shame. Nothing but lingering joy and the certainty that he had said the right thing.


	2. Chapter 2

Later, in his office, Chakotay stared unseeing at the padd in front of him. He'd read it before, the bottom of the message bore his imprint but he couldn't remember giving the mark of approval. Did he give that affirmation too easily, without thinking? He bit his lip and clenched his eyes shut, unable to block out the memory of Kathryn's face when he offered it to her today, just the latest in a long series. Since he backed her decision to destroy the Array. Since he became her first officer. Since he told her that night on New Earth, obliquely, that her wish was his command.

If they had asked her...

But they hadn't. There was no point in playing that game. And if the questioner had intended to make his captain the next target, Chakotay had saved her by deflecting the conversation away. Why had he done that? Was he afraid of her answer? He had no doubt that Kathryn Janeway had the strength, the clarity, the dispassionate resolve to say no. He believed that she could tell herself something and make it true - she'd been telling herself "no" in answer to that question since the first time it was broached, that night on New Earth, or maybe even before. When had he first known?

That day in the corridor with Neelix...he remembered the captain in a coma, possibly dying, her name on his lips, only the presence of the crew keeping him from blurting it out. He'd known then. He'd known in the empty cargo bay, waiting to see which of their crew would abandon them to remain behind with the colony of humans they'd stumbled across - stay or leave, he hadn't really cared himself - whatever she wanted. He'd known while surrounded by a swarm of space creatures, with Kes going through a mating cycle, crew liaisons spilling out of turbolifts, Samantha announcing her pregnancy. He'd known when Kathryn talked about pairing off and having children, even if she exempted herself from the discussion. He might even have known the day he introduced her to her animal guide, when she came to play pool and stayed to have fun. There was a time when such a question, while inappropriate, would not have been unthinkable.

Why hadn't he let them ask her? Because he was afraid of her answer. Or perhaps because whatever it might be, he wanted her to choose whether or not to tell him -- to distance herself of her own accord, or to come to him freely.

His door buzzed.


	3. Chapter 3

Stiff-necked and unsmiling, the captain entered his office carrying a padd. Chakotay gave her a welcoming smile but she ignored him.

"These are the final numbers from the survey teams, I couldn't put them into the computer because Ensign Kim took the processor offline to integrate the new circuits. I thought you'd want to be aware of the dilithium situation. B'Elanna feels that we should find a magnacite deposit so we can refine the ore we collected. Neelix has suggestions about where to look."

"Yes, Captain."

"Thank you, Commander." Automatic. They'd known each other long enough that she had established routine to fall back on.

"Was there anything else?"

Superficial hesitation, look of airy indifference. "Nothing that can't wait till the staff meeting."

He smiled fully at her, open, affectionate, and was a little hurt when she actually recoiled, looking away from him at the decorations on his office walls. Maybe it wasn't rejection, though. Maybe her reaction to his grin meant the same thing as his reaction when she used to touch him - not that it wasn't welcome, but that it was rather too desirable to tolerate at certain moments.

"You should have refused to answer," she said softly.

"I'm sorry if I upset you." He meant it, because he knew he had distressed her; the unhappiness on her face was achingly clear. "I'm not a very good liar, Kathryn."

"I'll keep that in mind." Her mask slipped for a minute, then smoothed back into place. "Chakotay, that wasn't just an idle question from a curious alien. It wasn't necessarily benevolent. If we permit our personal feelings to overrule our command commitments, we could put the entire ship at risk..."

"Is this the royal 'we,' or the 'we' you use to create a sense of camaraderie among recalcitrant crewmembers?"

He'd meant the question as a joke, but it shut her down. Her eyes darkened into the expression she usually reserved for alien menaces who had just threatened her.

"Do you understand me, Commander?" He looked downward, and she said, "Good."

His gaze snapped back to hers. Maybe she thought she had to do this. Maybe this was her way of reestablishing control over the situation. Should he have told her that she misunderstood him, that he hadn't meant what he had in fact so passionately meant - he could claim to have been speaking as a colleague, a friend, a human of deep feelings trying to make himself understood an alien who didn't understand love...

No. He wasn't going to lie, to her or to himself. Not any more.


	4. Chapter 4

"Did I ever tell you why I joined the Maquis, Kathryn?"

Her eyes widened as she opened her mouth and closed it again. The question had taken her off-guard. She was curious, she wanted to know what the answer was, but also why he had asked, and the latter part made her nervous.

"Your father was killed by the Cardassians, and you left to take his place in the fighting...?" she began. That was the official speculation in his file, based on his own letters, some of which had been intercepted by Starfleet Intelligence. It didn't even come close to the whole story, and she knew it, but it was all he'd ever really said to her on the matter. Some topics couldn't be broached. Love was one. This was another.

"It had to do with a fundamental difference between how I see the universe and how Starfleet Command does. Take the Prime Directive, for instance, which Starfleet upholds about seventy-five percent of the time. Don't argue for a minute - " he could see her about to object " - even you've broken it. I've been there; we've discussed it. But if someone asked you, you'd say you would make any sacrifice for that principle, right?"

He waited for her to blink and nod, filing away her arguments for later. "Some principles are simply incompatible," he went on. "There are things I swore to do in the name of Starfleet which I couldn't, when put to the test. You know that too from my file. I thought at first that it meant I was weak, but I think it means I was strong. I couldn't betray my integrity just to follow the letter of a law."

"You can't say a simple word like 'no' if you believe it to be a lie," she challenged.

"That depends on whether the lie is about whether Voyager has any spare polaric funnels, or about who and what I am. There is a difference. Kathryn, would you want a first officer who never expressed his personal beliefs, just parroted Starfleet regulations? I don't think so, or you would have given my job to Tuvok a long time ago." Again, she didn't interrupt, though she could have - pointed out, for instance, that when she made the choice to make him first officer, the threat of Maquis mutiny must have seemed real to her, though it quickly became remote. He stood to pace as he continued.

"When I joined the Maquis, I was aware that our cause might trigger a war between the Federation and Cardassia, and millions of people could lose their lives. I was not naively defending my own territory. I believed the Federation had broken its own obligations to its citizens, and I refused to remain a part of the force defending a treaty that should never have been signed in the first place. First the DMZ, where next? It's a slippery slope we never should have started."

"What about the lawful remedies? You had a great many legal options open to you, particularly as a Starfleet officer. There's a difference between resigning as a matter of conscience, and joining an outlaw organization. The law isn't perfect, it never has been, and there have been casualties of its imperfection, but that's not a reason to throw away all the lawful..."

"Well, I'm oversimplifying the story, but did you know that I was asked twice by Starfleet review boards whether I was a member of or had any contact with the Maquis? Just because I was from Dorvan V, and because of my father? I hadn't spoken to him for years before he died. I hadn't been back to Dorvan since I left for the Academy. Yet I was being questioned as a potential terrorist. I did not have real legal options, and neither did any of the rest of us. But that's beside the point."

"Why?" she asked, her brows furrowing.

"I didn't bring this up so that we could have an argument about the DMZ at this late date. You know, I had an argument all rehearsed for you in case you asked, during those first few weeks I was serving under you, in case you planned to test my loyalty. But you never asked." He grinned at her, and for the first time since they returned from the last mission, she smiled back at him. His memories of those weeks were giddy, filled with her - working beside her, getting to know her, discovering that she was genuinely interested in him and his background and how he thought - labels like "Maquis" hadn't influenced her judgment. So she shouldn't have been too surprised by what he said next.

"I can't swear fealty to an abstract like the Prime Directive."

Her expression changed, flattening into something almost feral. All trace of a smile, of open-mindedness, even of interest was gone. "Chakotay, you swore fealty to the Prime Directive when you became a Starfleet officer, and you did it again when you accepted a commission from me."

"It's words, Kathryn. I've betrayed things I swore fealty to before. Things - not people." They sat in silence for a long moment, with her staring at him.

"What does that mean?" she demanded finally.

"I didn't accept a commission from Starfleet. I accepted a commission from you. That's the only reason I was able to rationalize the merger of the crews - I know a lot of the Maquis thought I had sold them up the river, or else that I was biding my time, playing you, so I could make a bid for control. I wasn't doing either. I made a commitment to what I believed in. It has not been difficult because it's rare for me to have a conflict with your decisions, even at times when as a Starfleet officer I don't necessarily agree that even you are following the rules."

Kathryn was staring out the viewport as if she'd just discovered some hidden message in the stars, which she was trying to decipher before answering or looking at him. Her mouth was twisted in an expression of displeasure. "What made you decide to tell me this now?"

"You think I shouldn't have said yes." He thought that perhaps she'd think he meant in the past, when she asked him to become her first officer, but she knew exactly what he was talking about; her stiff discomfort and refusal to meet his eyes made that very clear. "That wasn't just a question about my romantic feelings. That was a question about who I am. What I believe in. I couldn't say no without betraying my honor."

"You and I haven't taken any oath like that."

"We could." Her eyes challenged him. Did she think he was going to ask her to marry him? The idea burned brightly for a moment like a diamond, then he pushed it aside. "You haven't. You can't speak for me. Not about this."

She was silent for a long time, so long that he thought she might be composing not merely an argument but an ultimatum. She could insist that he was unfit to serve as first officer. And if she truly believed that, he wasn't sure at this point that he'd quarrel with her. On the one hand, he honestly believed that he was by far the best-qualified person on board to fill the position, and she knew that. On the other hand, if she couldn't work with him, knowing what he'd confessed...that was something he had always known was possible if this barrier was crossed. Which was why she had never wanted to cross it. He was prepared for a speech about their professional obligations, so she shocked him when she finally spoke about the issue they were dancing around.

"Do you know why we can't be lovers, Chakotay?"

"Fraternization issues and crew respect..."

"Not just that, not just protocol. That's part of it, but there's a reason for it. You're talking philosophical issues, so am I." She stood, still not looking at him, shoulders slumped as though she'd been defeated even though he hadn't raised a word of argument yet. "There are a number of command situation holodeck programs which are only accessible under the captain's personal access code. They're adaptable, and situational - the privacy regulations don't apply, so the images and personalities of crewmembers can be used without regard to the Barclay Recommendations. Sort of like Insurrection Alpha - I think Tuvok thought that would shock me much more than it did, but I'd been working with similar situations since I took command." Kathryn turned to go, taking a few paces toward the door. "I'm going to remove the privacy seal on one of my programs. It was based on an incident during James T. Kirk's first five-year mission on the Enterprise, in the Minarvan system. I want you to look at 'Gem.' Then you'll know why you shouldn't have said yes. Goodnight, Chakotay." She walked out without looking back at him.


	5. Chapter 5

"You will release them, this minute, or we will destroy your entire base." From his vantage point as an observer of the simulation, Chakotay could see that the Vidiian thought Janeway was bluffing; they had no idea how much firepower Voyager had. And in under any other circumstance, the Vidiian would have been right: they couldn't afford to expend over half their torpedoes on destroying this minor outpost. Nonetheless, she declared, "I have over thirty photon weapons at my command. I suggest you take that threat very seriously."

Onscreen, the Vidiian shook his head. "We will let you leave this system unharmed. But we cannot release your officers to you. Too many lives are at stake. The need is urgent."

Kathryn was stalling, to give the away team time...they had a rescue mission in the works. She played the bluff. "Mr. Kim, arm photon torpedoes. Fire on my mark..."

"Wait." The smaller, troubled-looking man behind the Vidiian leader murmured something to the taller man, who turned slightly, listening. Nodding. Turning back to Janeway on the viewer. "We will show you that both of your people are unharmed."

He gestured to someone not visible on the screen, and a moment later, a holographic Chakotay and Tuvok were led in by two armed Vidiian holographic guards. Tuvok's face revealed nothing, not even revulsion at the bloody hand that gripped his forearm. His own double's jaw was tightly clenched, his eyes nightmare-dark, but when he looked up into the viewscreen where Janeway waited, his face softened. Chakotay was shocked at the message he read clearly in his own shining eyes: _I didn't want to die without seeing you again._

She read the message as well; her lower lip trembled violently for a moment before she caught it between her teeth. The alien began to speak again. "Perhaps a compromise is possible. We are willing to release one of your officers. We cannot release both of them, the need is too great. Choose."

The word was so shocking that they all stood stock still, forgetting to breathe for several moments, so that when Janeway finally drew in air it made her cough. Choose. Between her advisor and her next in line, between a man who had left his family to follow her and a man who had given her his ship and crew? Between her best friend and her closest advisor? Both of them were trying to catch her eye on the screen, saying her name ("Captain"), voices in counterpoint. "It is logical for you to retrieve the Commander. The Maquis crewmembers who formerly served under him..." "Tell them to send Tuvok, his knowledge of Voyager's systems are critical to the continued safety..." "It is in the best interests of the entire crew to maintain the command structure..." "If you depend on his counsel, you need him on the ship..."

Both ready to die for the other. For her.

All she had to do was to say one name, and one of her officers would be on his way back to the ship. The rescue attempt would go forward, they would still have a chance to retrieve whichever man she did not set free now, with a word - a better chance, even, with someone on the team who had been inside. It made sense for her to speak. Neither one of them would fault her, whichever man she did not save would understand, Chakotay knew Tuvok would find it logical and he realized the decision was for the ship. So did his image, which was now ignoring Janeway, speaking directly to the aliens. Tuvok was trying to hold him back.

"If I beam aboard your vessel, will you release both of them?" she demanded.

"I won't let you do that!" the Chakotay on the screen shouted, while Tuvok raised both eyebrows practically on top of his head and began to spout directives, logic, he couldn't even hear what else because Delar looked at her and spoke:

"Yes."


	6. Chapter 6

Kathryn had saved three versions of the simulation entitled 'Gem." The first was the one in which she gave herself up, over his own frantic protests demanding that the doctor relieve her of duty on the grounds that she was not sane, with Tom quietly pointing out that refusing to choose might be the only sane choice the Captain could make. She'd left her first officer access to the logs she'd made after the simulation. In the first one she was calm, angry, disgusted with herself for not having come up with a better solution - the rescue attempt failed, and the program ended with her strapped to a Vidiian biobed, with an alien injecting something cold and deadly into a vein. She had known realistically that giving up her life was never truly an option, and admitted that knowing she was on the holodeck had colored her decision to martyr herself.

Then came the version in which she yielded to logic and left Tuvok, who died in the midst of the rescue attempt. In the logs she made after the second simulation, she was agitated, frightened, and a little wild. "If this were real, and Tuvok had died, I think I would have tracked down the Vidiian homeworld and flown this ship straight into the heart of it, I would have killed as many of them as I could have taken with me...no bluff," she grated in a shaky voice. "I chose. As if one can choose between the right arm and the left. I knew that I might have to make a sacrifice such as this when I took the job of captain, but it's unthinkable, to have to choose between my oldest friend and the man I - well. I am going to have to play that one out, since it's the most realistic outcome of the scenario. He's the senior officer on the mission; he's the one with the deciding vote as to whether he should stay and wait for the rescue which might not come or not. The moral choice is not to choose, but I don't have that luxury; if I can't make the choice, I have no right to command."

She didn't leave a log attached after the simulation in which she left him with the Vidiians. In that version, the holodeck's random narrative generation program had elected to let the rescue mission succeed, and he was brought back safely to Voyager after the captain abandoned him to the Vidiians to save Tuvok. Kathryn hadn't terminated the program once he was safely back on board the ship. Instead she had played out several hours of extrapolated interaction afterwards. That was an option Starfleet had included in its programming so that commanding officers could record and save their projected behavior for discussion with counselors after running the simulations. Of course, Kathryn Janeway had not had access to a Starfleet counselor since this mission began.

In the simulation, his holo-image went to the ready room and found her there, crying.

She didn't even know he was there at first. He watched her for a few minutes, not meaning to intrude, but not knowing what to do about it. She sat slumped on the floor by her desk; seeing her like that broke his heart. He wondered what she would have said if she'd found him in his office crying.

He walked around behind her, sat down pressing against her back. He felt her jolt, but she didn't turn around when he stroked her shoulder. She knew who it was. The air was thick and fragrant from the flowers brought by Kes, even more so close to her. If they weren't already in holo-simulation, he would have wondered why she didn't go to the holodeck, to find someone fictional to cry to.

She sat with him for a long time. Longer than the real Kathryn Janeway would ever have sat with him in such a situation. He began to knead the tight muscles of her upper back, taut beneath his hands. She seemed to be resisting him, pushing back against his hands with her shoulders, unable or unwilling to relax. He didn't know what else he could do for her. After a few minutes she took a few deep breaths and touched one of his hands with one of hers.

"I'm sorry," she said. Her face turned toward their clasped fingers.

"Don't be." He was surprised at how even his voice was and wondered whether he would sound patronizing to her, but she did not release his hand. He sat behind her, close enough to feel the heat from her body but not close enough that it could be misconstrued as an embrace.

"Not about this. About..." She fell silent.

"You didn't have any real choice. I'm sorry you had to go through that." Her eyes flashed to his face, then she turned away, biting her lip. "I think it might have been worse for you than for me," he said softly.

"No. I knew what I had to do to protect the crew. Tuvok was right next to me, helping me rationalize it." A flash of unexpected fury in her voice. She flinched. "To know that you've been abandoned to...Chakotay, if I had it to do over again, I would not make the same decision. And I can't live with that. I can't be the captain and live with that."

The simulation stopped.


	7. Chapter 7

It was past 0300 hours when he buzzed her door, but she was awake. He knew she'd be expecting him, and while he wasn't sure he was up to facing her at the moment, he thought it would be worse to confront her with his absence. If her deepest fear was abandonment as Captain of Voyager - that she would be left alone and find herself unable to function in that position - then the discussion couldn't wait. He did take time to wash his face and get some coffee; if it hadn't been so late, he would have gone looking for some of that bootleg alcohol Dalby didn't think he or Kathryn knew about. It had never affected anyone's performance on duty, so they turned blind eyes.

She met him at the door in her half-lit living room, and silently brought tea for both of them while he sat on one of her couches and stared at nothing, chin resting in his hands with his fingers steepled in front of him. He felt shaken, but not as torn apart as she had looked in the simulations. From the dates on her logs, he knew when she'd run them: before New Earth, sometime after the Vidiians had forced the destruction of the duplicate Voyager. He wondered what had triggered her interest in the programs. And why she'd stuck with them, without telling anyone.

When she sat, he glanced at her, picked up the tea and swirled it in the cup, then put it back down without taking a sip. Watching him, she said, "I listened to Kirk's logs. The ones about what happened in the Minarvan system."

Chakotay had done that, too, years earlier when he'd studied Kirk's logs for a project at the Academy. Kirk, his first officer, and his CMO had been taken hostage by aliens who were intent on testing an empath's willingness to give her life for others. The Minarvans had tortured Kirk while his friends agonized, expressing their concerns to the empath, Gem. Then the Minarvans had demanded that the captain choose one of the others to be tortured to death. Dr. McCoy gave his captain and friend a sedative to spare him further agony. Then, when Spock pulled rank on McCoy and insisted that he would be the one to go with the Minarvans, the doctor had knocked him out too. Witnessing the three men willing to give their lives for one another, Gem offered her life to save McCoy, and in so doing earned salvation for her entire species, who were rescued by the Minarvans when their sun went nova.

Kirk had focused most of his official recordings on Gem. He said very little about being faced with the decision of which of his best friends to give up to the aliens, and nothing about the betrayals of the command structure with which the Vulcan and the doctor had overstepped their positions. It wasn't the first time Spock and McCoy pulled rank on Kirk, nor would it be the last. They didn't see it that way. As had so often been the case with Kirk, everything turned out fine in the end; neither of his crewmembers was permanently harmed, and they came away with the knowledge that they had helped save a race from extinction.

"Did you learn anything from Captain Kirk? Or from Gem?" Chakotay asked Kathryn.

"I learned that the choice I had to make wasn't really between you and Tuvok," she nodded, then picked up the teacup and took a sip. She put the cup back down again, folding her hands on her knees. "How would you feel, if I died accidentally because of a decision you made while in command?"

There were not adequate words to describe the emotions that flooded him at the suggestion. "I'd have a very hard time with it," he noted. Kathryn nodded.

"I remember you trying to stop me on a number of occasions when I made a decision which could have cost me my life. But I never doubted that you could survive such an experience, or I wouldn't have let you remain my first officer. I also know that, if you died accidentally on a mission for the ship, or if you made a choice while in command which cost you your life, I could survive it. It would be devastating, but it wouldn't destroy me. But I could have to order you into certain death if I thought it was necessary to save the ship. I might even have to do it without your consent, or without your agreeing with my decision. I have no doubt that you'd follow the order even if you knew it would cost you your life." She stopped for a moment and bit her lip hard, looking away from him. "You'd do it for me."

"You're right."

"That's the choice."

"I don't understand."

She took another swallow of tea and rubbed at her throat before speaking again. "I could give that order, but I'm not sure that wouldn't destroy me. The choice in that simulation isn't about who I'd pick: I know either one of you would die to protect this crew. There are equally balanced reasons for picking either one of you. The problem is that whichever way I chose, it would be for selfish reasons. In the absence of material criteria on which to base the decision, I'd choose to save whichever of you I decided I required to function as captain. I never know how selfish I'm being now when I refuse to let you take risks, Chakotay."

"Maybe you have to be selfish," he murmured.

"That's not fair. It's not fair for me to use my personal desires as a scale in situations like that - "

"You wouldn't be human if you didn't, Kathryn," he interrupted her. "You heard Kirk's logs. Do you think Spock was using logic when he decided he was more expendable than Kirk or McCoy?"

"It doesn't matter. I couldn't live with knowing that I made a selfish decision which cost one of my crew his life. So I can't have...have any personal reason to value one crewmember over any other. That's something the crew has to be able to trust me on."

"What if it had been Tuvok and B'Elanna? They're also both essential to the ship and you care about them both personally, right? What would you have done?"

"I...I don't know."

"Isn't it the same problem? You have personal reasons for choosing one or the other?"

"It's not the same." Her eyes were pleading with him. "You know why it's not the same."

"Kathryn, would it be easier for you if I left the ship, permanently?"

His question sent a shudder through her. Not the sort of horrified shock as if she'd never considered the possibility - it was a deja vu sort of reaction, eyes closing against the question, like a nightmare made manifest. She managed to say, "No."

"Why not?"

"Because if you leave..." Her voice quavered and she bit her lip hard. What did it matter, he'd just witnessed her sobbing on the holodeck...still, that was a simulation, not face to face. "If you leave, I'm not sure I can get this ship home. I could do it if something happened to you, but not if you decided you couldn't stand by the crew because of me." Tears hovered in the corners of her eyes, threatening to slide down her cheeks. "I need you here. No one is expendable on this crew, but least of all you. To them, and to me, personally."

He accepted that with a nod, ignoring her tears; he didn't want her to think he'd come here expecting her to break down in his arms like in the simulation. "I thought about that scenario. If the question were posed to me, and it were you and any other crewmember, I would have chosen to save you. Even if it were B'Elanna. I don't know what it would do to me, but I would choose." He paused to look right at her. "I would have chosen you. I don't know whether that makes me unfit to be your second in command, or if it's a sign that I understand my duty completely."

"It means that you can't possibly put yourself in my place. You're not the captain," she noted.

He sat and looked at her for awhile while she drank her tea, not speaking. The circles under her eyes were dark with exhaustion. After a few minutes, he held out a hand to her. "Maybe shutting me out, and shutting all of us out, is the only way you can protect yourself in case of a situation like that. But Kathryn, you can't function alone indefinitely, either."

"I don't usually feel alone. Only when you ask me to make a choice that I can't make."

"I'm not asking you to make a choice. I'm here with you, aren't I?"

"You are. Every day, you are."

"Is that a problem?"

"You ask me to make the choice every day. When you go and pull stunts like that one today, which force the issue..."

"They asked the question. I only answered it."

"It was selfish. And cowardly."

He started to laugh. Incredulous at first, then genuinely amused, and then all-out howling, head thrown back. She stared, shaking her head.

"It wasn't that funny."

"You..." he chortled. "You called me a coward." So fast that she couldn't have seen it coming when he was limp from laughter on her couch, he hauled her to her feet, leaving his hands on her shoulders with a tight grip so that she had no choice to see his face even when she tried to look away. "All right, I concede. I'm a coward. I refused to find the courage to settle for our usual working relationship forever by throwing out my feelings. I've been doing that for years. But it is not easy to say 'I love you' to someone who doesn't return the feeling in front of a roomful of strangers and people who are going to tell every single person in your life, either. If you read your chivalric literature, that is not cowardly. Do you have any idea how hard it is to feel that, and not be able to stop it, and not be able to do anything about it for years?" He was still smiling a little, relieved to have all this out in the open, but there was force behind his words: he was angry. She lifted her head to look directly into his eyes.

"Yes. I do." She wasn't smiling. Was she angry? No, she was starting to choke up. The moment verged on confessional. "I didn't say you were the only one here who's a coward..."

"Don't you call yourself that." His grip on her shoulders lessened for a moment, but before she could step back, he had her crushed hard in his arms, so tightly she could barely breathe. He felt her go limp, but he knew it wasn't any kind of surrender - she was just refusing to force the issue by fighting. "You're right, I was selfish, I couldn't stand not saying it when I had the chance, right in front of everybody. It wasn't fair to you but Kathryn, it's not fair to me to tell me I can't even have those feelings..."

If only there were a holo-simulation about how to deal with being in love with one's captain. Maybe if he'd seen one of those as far back as she'd seen the one which had placed a permanent barrier between them...no, it was too late by then. Maybe it had been too late since he met her.

"Chakotay, I can't love you and be captain of this ship. If you force me to make a choice, then there is no choice. You're my first officer and my best friend, and I need you to be those things, but it has to stop there, and you have to tell me you can live with that."

"What if I said I couldn't?"

"Then..." She would have to tell him to step down. Or leave the ship. Not even an implied threat, but a fact they both knew. She didn't say that. "You would have to live without me, Chakotay. And I would have to live without you." Her arms moved around him. Holding him there, or hugging him goodbye? The breath she drew in was ragged, and her voice was filled with choked tears when she spoke. "Don't make me do that." Her voice cut off and he let himself hold her, moving his arm over hers, his chin almost on her shoulder. "It could happen like that simulation. We both know what's necessary during command decisions..." She stopped and inhaled raggedly, hyperventilating, then spoke quickly. "I don't think I could do it."

"I couldn't, either. Not like that."

"Don't say that." Alarmed, pulling out of his arms, her face pointed with fear. "How did you feel, watching the last version of the simulation? When I chose to let you die?"

She thinks I need to punish her, he realized. Not because I blame her. Not first officer to captain, but me to her, personal. "I knew you had no choice. And...I was afraid you'd blame yourself. I've seen you do it for other crewmembers. I thought that if you didn't make the choice, and you let me live, the consequences would be awful, and you'd never forgive yourself for that. I didn't want to be the reason for that."

She was crying again helplessly, her free hand pressed hard to her lips in a fist. "You're right. If it had been real, I would have saved you, and I never would have forgiven myself. But I didn't think I could let you die that way, without telling you..." She stopped herself. "Don't make me say the words. I won't. It erases the distinction - I have to be able to see you as my first officer, when the moment comes. Not anything else. Damn you, Chakotay."

"Damn me?"

"You didn't have to take the question seriously." She made a sound somewhere between laughter and a sob. "Do you know how much easier it was when I could tell myself it was all fantasy, a product of my own overheated imagination..."

How could he make her realize that life was so much more valuable when one accepted love rather than denied it? "How would you have felt if I said no?"

"Relieved. Maybe a tiny bit sorry, somewhere deep down. But I'm a starship captain, I'm supposed to be able to burn away weak spots like that. Sooner or later, you'll say no, anyway - maybe not in words, but you'll lose interest - you'll meet someone else. We would have stayed friends, I would have been able to live with that. I am in. command. of. this. ship."

"How many times do you think you have to say that to me? I know it, Kathryn. I wish there was some way I could make you believe that no matter what, I'll be here beside you."

"Will you?"

"Yes."

"You say that word too easily. And you smile too much."

"I never smile." She stepped back, out of his arms, and he grinned at her as best he could. His heart was too full to say anything more - he would only say the words she didn't want to hear, the ones she wouldn't take from him.

"End program," he said. Kathryn and her quarters vanished into the lights of the holo-grid.


	8. Chapter 8

"I've been playing around with your command training holographic scenarios," Chakotay admitted the next morning at breakfast.

"No wonder you look like you haven't slept." Kathryn's expression was indulgent - apparently he was forgiven, even though he was certain that when she gave him the commands to access the programs, she hadn't really expected him to go poking around. "And how did you do with the no-win scenarios?"

"Fine, I think. Graduated with flying colors." She laughed easily. "Did you ever run the one called 'Gem'?"

"Three times."

"That's funny. And unnerving. During a different simulation, the computer told me you'd run it three times." Had those been real? If so, had the discussion between himself and Kathryn been pure extrapolation, or had she run something very similar, which the computer had saved, and remembered? In which case he'd been talking to something not merely to a projection of her, but to something so close to reality that it made him dizzy.

"Did you run it?"

"In a way."

"I wondered who it would substitute for junior officers for anyone else."

"You're right about there being some interesting programming choices," he noted wryly. "Did the designers give the programs access to our personal logs?" He wondered how to ask the question without violating her privacy - or letting her know that it might have already been violated.

"From what I can gather, the programmers made these simulations dynamic and as realistic as possible. They can draw from almost any piece of information available on the ship to create scenarios the captain might actually have to face. The psychological possibilities are staggering. I actually had to create a holographic counselor to talk to."

"After you ran 'Gem'?"

"No." She looked down at the table, suddenly embarrassed. "After I ran...it was a program the computer came up with when I was trying to work through 'Gem,' actually, it was called 'The Love Test.'" His heart started to pound. He hadn't looked at the name on the program until afterwards. "I think I failed it pretty thoroughly," Kathryn said with a twist of her mouth.

"Why is that?"

"It was a simple yes or no question. All I had to do was answer."

He couldn't resist, he had to know, no matter what the knowledge did to him. "What did you say?"

"I deleted it."

Kathryn Janeway had run away from a holographic question? That was more surprising than any answer she could have given. And, perhaps, why the computer had selected it at random when he'd loaded the command simulations to use himself. But if she'd deleted it, the program should not have been saved at all...unless the narrative parameters file required an access code even higher than the captain's, which would suggest that Starfleet was permitting holograms to spy on its senior officers, wouldn't be the first time for such behavior but it seemed highly unusual on a ship like Voyager which had never been meant for long-term deep-space missions. What did that mean about their computer?

He said neutrally. "That's too bad. I'd like to have seen it."

"I'll bet you would have." The comment was directed more at herself than at him, an inside joke. "What's funny about this program is that it's not one of the ones from the initial database. The system is interactive, so the computer comes up with new scenarios based on the ship's logs and the situation on board. It seems to have generated this random probability all on its own."

"Maybe it wasn't on its own. Maybe if, as you say, the program is adaptible, it thought that scenario was particularly relevant to your situation."

"That would almost suggest sentience on the part of the program. There were too many details that only someone who...no. It was a glitch."

"Would you think it was a glitch if you discovered that the computer had saved the program?"

"I used two deletion protocols. If that program were still in there I'd consider it an act of..." Her eyes had frozen on his face, looking very much the way they had when the alien in the simulation first asked him whether he loved her. "Chakotay," she said carefully, "...you didn't..."

He couldn't stop the smile that burst across his features. "I said yes."

It was the same feeling as the first time. Like a bad old song, he reflected distantly - there were no flowers blooming or birds tweeting in the mess hall, but there might as well have been. And this time, he let himself keep looking at her. She looked a little horrified. She didn't look a bit surprised. She swallowed hard.

"What happened?"

"You told me I shouldn't have. We argued. You showed me your 'Gem' simulations to convince me it was a mistake."

"The computer did all that?" she demanded, amazed.

"I don't know whether they were your actual simulations. But I have a feeling they were."

The captain of Voyager looked uncharacteristically disoriented. "I am going to have to check that damn thing's programming," she said incredulously.

"You gave it permission to accept my authorization code. It must have decided it was all right to give me access to the simulations you'd already played."

"Did it let you listen to my logs?" she asked sharply. He hesitated, on the verge of lying, to salvage their professional relationship.

"Yes."

Kathryn sat back and exhaled hard through her mouth. "I would not have believed the computer was capable of this."

"Betraying your privacy to me?"

"Playing matchmaker." She was blushing furiously. "That's what it was doing - trying to force us to talk to each other about the things we were talking to simulations about. There must be a reason that our psychological programs are doing that, but really..."

"There's only one way to get to the bottom of this." He was grinning helplessly, still buoyant - he'd said yes and she hadn't said one negative word. Not one. "I think we should go to the holodeck together and look into the narrative parameters file." He wanted to make a joke about defining parameters. He did not. He just sat there with what he knew was a goofy smile on his face, the one she'd said he used too often. Kathryn gave him a sharp, appraising look.

"You won't have to make any impossible choices," he assured her.

The captain made a face, chewing the inside of her cheek, then met his eyes and the challenge in them. "I answered before I deleted it," she said. "It was only a simulation." Silence stretched between them like an electrical current. "I deleted it, and then - I remember what I did now. I stood there, and I said, 'There are some things you can't delete, Kathryn.' Then I double-checked the logs to make sure there wasn't a record, and I left."

"I guess it listened to you," he suggested.

"Yes." She hesitated as she rose. The word was charged - probably would always be charged between them now, handed from one to the other like a jewel. "Well. I'm going to go have a talk with my holographic counselor. Care to join me?"

"Yes," he replied, handing the word back to her. A simulated gem, but it made his face glow with happiness. He followed her out the doors toward deck six.


End file.
